


So I never have to lose.

by orphan_account



Category: Code Black (TV)
Genre: M/M, blood mention, death mention, drug mention
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-15
Updated: 2016-03-15
Packaged: 2018-05-26 20:20:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,219
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6254479
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mario switches it up and covers for Angus this time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	So I never have to lose.

“Dr.Savetti what happened out there?” 

There’s no answer. 

“Leigton what happened out there?”

Again no answer. 

Leanne sighs, clearly frustrated with her residents. 

“This is not a rhetorical question,”  she says. Oddly, her voice lacked the anger that it had been dripping with only seconds before, but the atmosphere in the room remains thick and heavy with tension as Leanne tried to get to the bottom of the problem. 

“She was unconscious and she had no pulse so I started CPR.” From across the small, crowded, room. Angus hears the words escape from Mario’s lips. He almost isn’t sure he’s heard them correctly, but he has. He heard Mario own up to a mistake that he hadn’t made. A mistake that Angus had made. 

He drops what he was doing and his eyes locked on Mario and Leanne as Leanne yelled a command and point away from the patient that they were working on, but he couldn’t hear what she said but he watched them walk away with fear written across his face. 

It took him four attempts, and Malaya’s cold hands on his arm to get the stitches right because his hands were shaking too hard to get it right and even then it took him frustratingly long to do what he could have done in a minute or two if he hadn’t been thrown off of his game. It was like the cloud of motivation to move as fast as he could had cleared and now all he could feel was reality beginning to set back in. 

He’s aware of what seemed like every single noise, although none of it was comprehensible he could hear it, and every time someone accidentally brushed up against him he jumps. 

He’s doing what Grace is telling him to do but it’s like he’s being carried by something other then his own free will. Muscle memory carries him through the motions, checking the patient to make sure they’re alright but every touch feels like sandpaper, and the ringing in his ears just won’t go away. The screaming patients. The sound of monitors beeping. 

Things he’d be able to block out before become all too annoying now. 

Ripping packages, the sounds of someone doing CPR across the room. Jesse’s voice as he tells the other nurses what to do. 

Weren’t they supposed to be going on strike?

Christa’s talking to him, he thinks she’s asking him if he’s ok now that the pace in the room has slowed down, if only for a few seconds. 

The answer is no. He’s so full of raw and confusing emotions and he doesn’t know what to do with them. Every thing is overwhelming and he doesn’t know how to make it stop. He doesn’t know if he wants to cry, or punch something. If he wants to sleep for the next seven hours or do sprints around the hospital. 

He doesn’t know if he wants to go find Mario and yell at him, or if he wants to thank him. 

“Yeah… that bomb thing just shook me up a little bit,” he lied easily. Something he’d somehow managed to master recently.  

“Hey,” Mike pressed a hand to Angus’ shoulder and Angus jerks away from the touch. It’s too much. “Take a break. Ok?” 

Angus nods. His feet carry him to the break room and he wants to call Heather and ask her for more Adderall but he knows she won’t answer and his hands are still shaking too hard to dial the number anyway. He settles for coffee and he’s pouring himself a mug when his shaking hands get the best of him again and the cup of hot brown liquid goes tumbling out of his hands. The liquid scorches his arms and the glass shatters against the tile floor. 

That’s where Mario finds him what feels like forever later with a huge gash in the palm of his hand a mess of blood, glass, and tears. 

He doesn’t mean to find him, but he’s been assigned to the waiting room because Leanne is punishing him for Angus’ mistake that he’d fessed up to to cover for Angus, and he can’t live without coffee for another minute. There’s not much he’s allowed to do there anyway since the nurses have already attempted to help calm everyone down and collected their cellphones to make sure they weren’t using them as a detonator for another bomb. 

He’s got a blank look on his face, and Mario goes to touch him and the second his hand touches him Angus shakes it off and gently shakes his head. So Mario takes a few steps back and he starts to pick up the glass that had ended up farther away from Angus on the floor. 

He vaguely remembered his intro to psychology class and the lecture his teacher had given with the tag line being something like “panic attacks come in all shapes and sizes”. Suddenly he wishes that he’d paid more attention in psych. 

“Leanne sentenced me to the waiting room,” he says softly. “There’s no hot strippers there this time.” Mario doesn’t really know what he should say so he opts for just talking to him. “There is this kid though,” Mario chuckles. “He stuck a Lego piece up his nose and his dad told him that if they had to go to the hospital to get it out that they wouldn’t be able to afford to go to Disney because they don’t have insurance and I’m thinking, that’s a horrible thing to tell your kid, and the kid was like balling and his nose starts bleeding, I can tell there’s a Lego piece up there but there’s too much blood for me to get it out. 

“So I asked him if he’d been digging up there trying to get it out on his own and finally the sister admits that they’d tried to suck it out with a vacuum cleaner.” 

Angus lets out a small laugh. Like the laugh that you give when you’re typing ‘lol’ into a text message, not the type that means you actually think what you’re saying is funny. But Mario takes it as a sign that Angus is still alive in there. 

“I don’t know who got the idea that when your nose is bleeding you should tilt your head back, but it wasn’t a doctor that’s for sure. Ever since I went to med school I can’t watch movies the same way. Now I just that annoying guy who sits in the back like ‘that is totally not how you do C.P.R. you bitch.’ ” 

Mario realizes that if he doesn’t get back to work he’s probably going to get fired considering Leanne is still pissed at him from earlier but he doesn’t. Instead he gets up for long enough to grab the roll of paper towels from the counter. He runs a few under the cold water and then sits back down next to Angus. 

“Is it ok if I take a look at your hand?” Mario asks. 

Angus nods slightly and Mario takes his arm and presses the cold, wet, paper towel to the pink skin on his arm. 

“You know. They made a documentary about that lady that spilled hot coffee all over herself, she died recently…” Mario realizes that maybe that wasn’t such a good way to start that sentence and he back tracks. “Of unrelated things. She didn’t die from spilling hot coffee on herself, but… the documentary is interesting still. It makes me feel like I should have become a lawyer.”

“Why’d you become a doctor?” Angus asks. So softly that Mario almost misses it. 

“My mom,” Mario says. “Shockingly…” He reaches down to take Angus’ hand and pulls it towards him, trying to dab off the dried blood and see if the cut is still bleeding. “She was sick a lot. I guess Hep C and HIV do that to you…. One time I pushed this kid Chance off the swings, the kid was a real asshole he totally deserved it. He stole my favorite eraser and shoved it up his nose so I couldn't use it. Can you believe that?” 

Angus laughed imagining a ten year old Mario betting upset about an eraser. 

“It was shaped like a whale. My grandma gave it to me. Anyway, he cried but he wasn’t really that hurt and I said ‘the nurses office is for babies’ when Mrs.Clark sent him down there. The next day she made me shadow the nurse, Mr.Thomas, for the entire day and write a paragraph about how he wasn’t a sissy. 

”When I got home my mom asked me how my day was and I told her about it, and how I took care of people how I used to … take care of her when she was sick and she said ‘Doctor Savetti’ I like the sound of that.”

“Oh,” Angus says. “Is she still…” he lets his voice trail off. 

“No,” Mario says. 

“Oh, I’m sorry.” 

“You shouldn’t be.” Mario replies. “She didn’t care about me…. Does that hurt?” the cut on Angus’ hand is still bleeding and Mario thinks he’s probably going to have to get a few stitches but he doesn’t tell him that. 

“Yeah,” Angus winces. “Hey, Mario? What happened to that hot coffee lady?” Mario was glad to see that he was starting to come back now and change the subject before Mario said anything that was too painful. 

“She got third degree burns, and ended up getting like three hundred thousand dollars or something. The documentary was ore about frivolous lawsuits then about what happened to her. You should get some stitches.” Mario presses down on Angus’ hand and Angus winces  again. “Sorry.” 

“It’s ok,” Angus says softly. He starts to stand up, and uses his other hand to press down on the cut on his hand so that Mario could get up too. Mario picks up all of the pieces of glass he could, carefully, and brushes the rest of them into a tiny pile under the cabinet door with the tip of his shoe. He doesn't know where he should go to get a broom to pick it up so he figures that this will have to do for now. 

“Thank you,” Angus says. He sits in a chair at the table now, instead of on the floor. A little dizzy still but better. 

“Hey,” Mario says. “No problem."

“Mario I’m scared.” Angus says suddenly and his Adams apple bobs as he swallows what he’s going to say next. 

“Me too.” Mario admits. 

“Of what?” Angus asks. His voice is childlike and small. 

“Losing another friend,” Mario admits. 

“Another?” Angus asks. Mario puts a hand on the small of Angus’ back to lead him out of the break room. He finds an empty place in sides where he can stitch up Angus’ hand, hopefully without Leanne seeing him, and he sits down in front of him on the stool. 

It reminds him a lot of that time a few weeks ago when Heather had sewn him up after they’d watched a man try and shoot himself. What’s it with stitches that makes him want to kiss his friends? Maybe one day he’ll ask Angus if there’s a psychological reason for it, but instead he tries to answer the question. 

“I hung out with a bad crowd. People die all the time in those circles.” Mario says it like it doesn’t mean anything. 

“Mario?” Angus asks when Mario turns his back to him to get a pair of gloves. 

“Yeah?” Mario asks. 

“Has anything good ever happened to you in your life?” Angus asks. Mario wants to tell Angus that they should focus on him, but maybe by taking the painful subject off of the table Mario is helping him avoid the pain. He really should have paid attention in psych. 

“I got to follow the hot nurse around for a whole day,” Mario says. “He had some kind of accent, almost like Neal, but hotter. I wonder what he’s doing now? Probably something better then hanging out with ten year old kids all day.” 

“Neal is kind of hot,” Angus admits. “But seriously.” 

Mario sighs. “You,” he says. 

“What?” Angus asks.

“You said ‘has anything good ever happened to you?’ and I said ‘you’ because you’re the good thing that happened to me.” 

“I… I am.” 

Mario nods slightly. “You pushed me so hard to open up, and communicate I thought that I could do the same to you but I guess I’m not as good at it as you are. I wasn’t sure how else to get to you but then I remembered when you saved my ass with that lady from the home invasion and you looked like you needed saving then so….” Mario says all of this while he stares down at Angus’ hand stitching the cut closed. 

“If you ever want to talk about what ever you’ve been going through… you know where to find me,” and Mario looks up at him and gives him a smile, the type where the corners of his eyes sort of crinkle. 

“Thank you,” Angus says. 

Mario nods. “That’s what friends are for. Isn’t it?” 

“Yeah,” Angus repeats. “Friends.” 

 

**Author's Note:**

> This began as a prompt "Things you said that made me feel real" and I really wasn't sure how to take it so I kind of just tried to figure it out as I went. Whatever. I hope that I didn't fuck this up too badly. It's also kind of an AU version of the finale episode. 
> 
> Also I'm not good at titles so I totally just stole a lyric from an all time low song a daydream away so there's that.


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